Max Planck Institute: Neanderthals thought like we do

At least 70,000 years ago Homo sapiens used perforated marine shells and colour pigments. From around 40,000 years ago he created decorative items, jewellery and cave art in Europe. Using Uranium-Thorium dating an international team of researchers co-directed by Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, now demonstrates that more than 115,000 years ago Neanderthals produced symbolic objects, and that they created cave art more than 20,000 years before modern humans first arrived in Europe. The researchers conclude that our cousins’ cognitive abilities were equivalent to our own.

…

“Neanderthals created meaningful symbols in meaningful places”, says Paul Pettitt from University of Durham, also a team member and cave art specialist. In the Cueva Ardales, where excavations are currently being conducted by a German-Spanish team, the presence of Neanderthals has also been proven from analysing occupation layers. “This is certainly just the beginning of a new chapter in the study of ice age rock art”, says Gerd-Christian Weniger of the Foundation Neanderthal Museum Mettmann, one of the leaders of the Ardales excavations. More.

So what’s with the theistic evolutionists insisting that Neanderthals are a different species? How come they are going to the wall for Darwin when no one else is?

They must really need that missing link.

See also: Theistic evolutionist: Neanderthals “not members of our own species,” despite evidence of Neanderthal ancestry. Theology can lead us to some weird places. Look, speciation is a huge mess right now. It really doesn’t matter how many species of giraffe there are, certainly not to the giraffe. But if we are involving humans in the debacle, we have clearly taken a wrong turn.